In the following essay, Nafisi discusses the importance of literature as a conduit for understanding across cultures.

What most of the mass media offers the public about Iran or Afghanistan or even about America is not knowledge; it's just soundbites. But, to look at it another way, what kind of a culture relies for knowledge just on media? The media is supposed to serve one aspect of our needs. The other aspect must be satisfied elsewhere, which is through imaginative knowledge.

Part of the reason people liked my book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, was because they could experience through reading it what a young girl experienced in a country called an Islamic Republic. And they realized that her desires and aspirations were not very different from their own. As a result the rather homogenized image of women from Iran has partly changed.

The media have tended to...